Getting a potential customer to a business location in order to conduct a sale may be one of the most difficult tasks for a business or advertiser. An advertiser may have to offer various inducements, such as coupons, discounts, parking validations, etc., in order to entice customers to the location. In some examples, “brick and mortar” businesses may even be forced to invest in more costly real estate near high-traffic areas as opposed to lower-cost real estate in more isolated locations. Occasionally, products may have higher profit margins for the advertiser which justify providing customers with free or low cost transportation (such as rental car agencies). Even then, the advertiser may still conduct intensive cost analyses and arrange complicated route planning with transit vendors. These factors may create a significant financial burden to a business.
In addition, these factors may also place significant burdens on potential customers. For example, a customer must arrange and pay for transportation to the business location whether or not the customer even completes a transaction.
In Internet-based commerce, advertisers often compete for “conversions,” or completed consumer transactions. Generally, advertisers may specify a maximum bid for a conversion and are charged each time a customer is directed to the advertiser's web site in order to complete the transaction. This, however, does not take into account (as it may not be required) the cost of transporting the customer to a business location to physically inspect merchandise or services.
Some offline advertising services also use this conversion-based advertising model by charging businesses for the cost of completed consumer actions, such as a sale, a visit, or providing personal information. Usually, this is accomplished by providing customers with a coupon or other item which is tied to a tracking code that shows how the customer was informed about the store or promotion. Again, these services do not take into account the cost (economic and temporal) of transporting a customer to a business location and place the burden of traveling to the business's location entirely on the customer.
In more well-developed and trafficked locations, for example the Las Vegas area, some transportation companies may arrange referral fees for directing customers to specific locations such as restaurants. However, these systems do not provide a reliable infrastructure for many transportation vendors or advertisers to compete and cannot make specific calculations about the desirability of a given customer to a particular business in real time. These referral arrangements may be done privately or in secret rather than via transparent auctions. Thus, these services may exist at the expense of consumers who are paying for the cost of the transportation without realizing that the transportation company is also receiving a referral fee. In addition, this approach also requires a critical mass of consumers in a specific geographic area and well-defined transportation systems, and it may rarely scale across significant distances.